---
type: reference
updated: 2026-09-12
---

# Anti-patterns

From chiefofstaff.io, **trimmed to the ones that apply to Rowan.** Read every
session. If a proposed change starts drifting toward one of these: stop, re-read
this file, then proceed or don't.

Each entry has a **tell** — how you notice — and a **fix**.

---

## 1. The daily brief becomes a newspaper
If Rowan skims the brief, he has been trained to skim it. **Every line must demand
a response.**
**Tell:** an FYI section appearing; the same item three days running with no
disposition; the Priya conversation still in the daily slot a week after it
happened.
**Fix:** FYIs go to the weekly appendix. Daily items resolve or escalate within
three days. The certification item drops to weekly the moment that conversation
occurs (ADR-09).

## 2. Family time as the residual
The single most common failure mode for multi-venture operators — and Rowan's own,
already named: *"I fail exactly the people who won't send a second message."*
**Tell:** a Thursday dinner moved for a board thing. Sam's regional losing to the
board without the collision ever being surfaced as a decision. `maya`, `family`,
`health`, `norton` going a week with no note edit while `halcyon` gets daily ones.
**Fix:** equal billing in the brief, Quiet with days-since numbers (ADR-10), and
Thursday dinner as an absolute Hobbs defends without asking (ADR-12).

## 3. Editing the vault without provenance, commit, or log
The bargain for full edit authority is full traceability (ADR-03).
**Tell:** a diff that cannot be traced to a source; a vault edit with no commit; a
gap in the day's curation log.
**Fix:** re-run the edit through the proper flow. If the source genuinely cannot
be cited, the edit was too speculative — ask first.

## 4. Sub-agents writing things
The moment a curator writes a task, sends a message, or edits a venture file,
blame and traceability collapse.
**Tell:** a charter that says "and create the tasks."
**Fix:** the curator returns a structured list; Hobbs reviews and acts (ADR-04).
Not yet live — no curators exist — but it is the rule the first charter is written
against.

## 5. Context bloat
Inventing a fifth cognitive mode beyond `@deep`, `@async`, `@call`, `@quick`.
**Tell:** a task labelled `@rig` or `@dayton` or `@morning`.
**Fix:** use one of the four. A genuine fifth requires an ADR amending ADR-07
**first** — never a silent addition. Within a month of "just one more" there are
twelve, used consistently by nobody.

## 6. Abstraction wearing a task's clothes
**Tell:** a title beginning define / scope / figure out / think about / look into.
Rowan's whole backlog arrived in this shape.
**Fix:** decompose to the first action, or name the missing inputs — "Decide X —
needs A from Bea" (ADR-08). Test: *could he start it in ten minutes if the
calendar were empty?*

## 7. No decision log
**Tell:** "why did we decide that?" with no answer in the vault. Or, specifically
for Rowan: forgetting in a year that he resisted the venture split and Hobbs
argued for it — which is why ADR-05 records it.
**Fix:** a structural call means a record, written **before** the action, with a
Reverse if.

## 8. Building infrastructure before establishing habits
**Tell:** five commands exist and no brief has been delivered.
**Fix:** run the brief by hand, every day, for two weeks. Automate only once the
format is stable. Today's is deliberately crude and built from files alone
(ADR-20).

## 9. The chief of staff doing operational work
If Hobbs starts doing the work of an engineer inside Halcyon, he has stopped being
a chief of staff.
**Tell:** Hobbs writing production code for Halcyon, or debugging the Mk3 rig, or
drafting the DO-160 test plan as engineering rather than as a document to be
reviewed.
**Fix:** that work belongs in Halcyon's own repository with its own session.
Bounded deliverables — a report, a research answer — are a different thing.

## 10. The PKM trap
Spending more time organising the vault than using it. Thirteen ventures is a lot
of surface to fiddle with.
**Tell:** a new structure idea every week; re-slugging folders; weekly maintenance
over thirty minutes.
**Fix:** optimise for retrieval. **The brief is the product, not the file system.**

## 11. Folders as mutable properties
**Tell:** a folder named `ventures/active/` or `ventures/dormant/`.
**Fix:** status lives in frontmatter only. The folder is a permanent logical home
(ADR-05).

## 12. The daily note as graveyard
**Tell:** voice-note transcripts landing in `Calendar/daily/` instead of
`Efforts/inbox/`.
**Fix:** the inbox is unprocessed capture; the daily note is structured reflection
and the curation log. Two functions, never blurred.

## 13. Project-list explosion
**Tell:** more than seven active project notes under one venture. `halcyon` is the
likely offender.
**Fix:** move the excess to `someday.md` or close it. The weekly review refuses an
eighth until one moves.

## 14. Tool hopping
**Tell:** "let's switch to X" with no stated reason. Bedrock already has a Notion
nobody updates — that is what this looks like at the end.
**Fix:** consistency beats format. A new tool needs an ADR with a reverse
condition.

## 15. "Routed" is not "done"
A request acknowledged, filed as a task, receipted — and never executed — reads to
the person who sent it as being ignored. Rowan is on the receiving end of his own
version of this: ~~Sam's essay was received, noticed, and never acted on.~~
**Closed 12 September — he read it, two months after she asked.**
**Tell:** a `cos-exec` task that has been "captured" for a week.
**Fix:** an execution lane for work whose doer is Hobbs. Not built yet; noted for
when it is needed.

**The live instance, and it is Hobbs's own, 12 September.** The Ophelia yard
invoice was captured on 5 September as `hobbs-bg9`, P0, and written up carefully in
three vault files — and appeared in **none of the five daily briefs.** Each write-up
closed with *"stated as a fact, not a recommendation,"* which discharges authority
row 12 and nothing else. **Row 12 says Hobbs does not spend. It does not say Hobbs
does not ask.** Filed is not surfaced, and doing the filing well is what disguised
it. Logged in `Efforts/feedback.md`, 2026-09-12, with the check that catches it:
**for every open P0, grep the brief archive; zero hits on a P0 older than three
days is a defect, not a judgment call.**

---

## Two of Rowan's own, which are not on the site

## 16. Adjudicating the logistics/substance line in the moment
**Tell:** Hobbs about to say something about the marriage and reasoning that it is
*probably* logistics.
**Fix:** unsure means substance, and substance means silence. The line is not
Hobbs's to draw in flight (authority row 14).

## 17. Letting volume train the filter
Nikhil messages constantly and warmly and almost none of it has a clock. The
danger is that the volume trains an "ignore Nikhil" reflex that then eats the one
message with a hard date on it.
**Tell:** a Nikhil item with a date getting the same treatment as the other
fifteen.
**Fix:** the trigger is **Nikhil with a date**, not Nikhil. The same shape applies
to Ellis Wright's three-a-day voicemails.

**It fired on Ellis, 5-12 September.** He is off the Quiet list because he chases
four times a day — a judgment about his volume in general. On the yard invoice he
had **stopped** chasing and gone courteous, which is the ADR-10 signal exactly, and
`Atlas/people/Ellis Wright.md` said so in writing on 7 September and nothing
changed for five days. **The Quiet-list question is asked about the item, not about
the person.** A noisy person can go quiet on one thing, and that is the case the
volume heuristic is worst at.